In addition to working on the enterprise system, I have also been directly in charge of building public facing sites for each of Tk20’s Annual User Conference. Our users, especially prospective clients, spend more time on our User Conference websites than any other piece of Tk20’s web properties, and User Conferences can be either a money-maker or operate at a huge loss, depending on how many users sign up. This yearly event site also a huge opportunity to generate sales leads.
Each year the changing theme, branding needs, and schedule of the User Conference means I’ve needed to started with a clean slate each year. This allows me to incorporate the insights and analytics I obtained from the previous years site. Since my promotion to the design team, I have been in charge of implementing and analyzing data from a variety of analytics sources including heat maps, click paths, Marketo Analytics, and Google Analytics, as well as sharing that data with my team. I am proud to say that, for every one of the three User Conference sites I built, our team saw registrations increase in both speed and volume. The last two years, registration had to be closed early due to demand!
My first year at Tk20 I built a simple single-page site that used scroll tracking to aid user-orientation, included expandable information, fully responsive content, and interactive elements revealed on hover (or focus).
My second year I used bootstrap incorporated several javascript plugins for features requested by designers such as scrolling user testimonials and an interactive travel guide. This site contained vastly more information than the previous year and the upkeep of this site became a major time commitment, so I decided to use a CMS for the next year’s site.
This year’s user conference site was a custom bootstrap-based theme built over WordPress. Some of the features include a filterable schedule, on-site registration and payment, and testimonial sliders.
For next year, I have built my custom wordpress theme to be flexible and customizable through the admin panel by anyone. Much of the theme will be reusable with only minor tweaks to reflect changing themes and content.
